FreeBSD diskless PXE booting

After a couple of trial and error tests and lots of caffeine ingested, I finally managed to install FreeBSD 9.1 over my network completely diskless using ISC’s DHCP, PXE, tftpd-hpa, and NFS.

1). Download iso image and copy over all files. (Where the /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64 directory is the root directory of the iso files)

wget ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/9.0/FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso
mount -o loop FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso /mnt
mkdir -p /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64
cp -a /mnt/* /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64
cp -a /mnt/.cshrc /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64
cp -a /mnt/.profile /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64
cp -a /mnt/.rr_moved /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64

2). Create the following additional directories:

mkdir /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64/jails
mkdir -p /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64/conf/base/jails
mkdir /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64/conf/default
chmod -R 777 /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64/conf
chmod -R 777 /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64/jails

3). Edit /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64/etc/fstab, comment out the entry in the file:

#/dev/iso9660/FREEBSD_INSTALL / cd9660 ro 0 0

4). Add the following entry to /srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64/etc/rc.conf:

root_rw_mount="NO"

5). NFS configuration:

/srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64    192.168.1.1/24(ro,sync,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)

6). dhcpd configuration (of course, IP may differ depending on your environment):

• 192.168.1.128 will be the IP that wil be assigned to the new FreeBSD system.
• 192.168.1.2 is the IP of the TFTP/NFS server where the installation files are stored in.

The filename path is relative to what path you configured with tftpd-hpa.

host freebsdboot {
  hardware ethernet 08:00:27:2b:f9:f8;
  fixed-address 192.168.1.128;
  filename "freebsd/amd64/boot/pxeboot";
  option root-path "192.168.1.2:/srv/tftp/freebsd/amd64";
}

Resources

• http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=30069
• http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2012-March/238969.html
• http://box.matto.nl/disklessfreebsd.html

Tags: [ freebsd ]

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